Last week, I
drove to my now former high school to pick my brother up. I had done this a few times over break, but
this time I decided to pay a visit to my band conductor and clarinet
teacher. I started private lessons
halfway through my freshman year and continued right up until I left for
Cornell this past summer. Granted, the summer
lessons were less “let’s play sixteenth notes at 120 beats per measure until
your fingers fall off” and more about playing things for fun.
I learned
the clarinet solo at the beginning of “Rhapsody In Blue,” one of about two
times clarinet vibrato is ever acceptable.
In case you were wondering, the other is when doing “dog howling at the
moon” impressions, which are particularly lifelike when you have, say, twenty
clarinets all playing vibrato at the same time.
(This actually happened at districts my junior year, to make a point
about why twenty clarinets should never play vibrato at the same time.)
Anyway,
while I was visiting, I realized it was kind of weird being back. There were cars leaving to go home, but when
you live on campus, you never really feel like you've left school. This means that the dense fog of
math/science/engineering confusion, in which Schrödinger wavefunctions and
distillation columns feature prominently, settles more or less permanently
around you for the duration of the semester.
Then there was the fact that everyone was crowded into one
building. At Cornell, there
were days when I had to walk up to five miles, to get to classes in the
morning, lunch, then pep band, dinner, and office hours at night. All in different buildings.
And then I realized that it had been four and a half years since I had first set foot in that building as a student. Some of the kids walking around were four or five years younger than I was. They were still all bigger than me.
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